


What pulls us apart

by Mymlen



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M, adam stays over at monmouth, sad late night kisses, sad teenagers, the summer before blue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-20
Updated: 2017-06-20
Packaged: 2018-11-13 10:34:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11183316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mymlen/pseuds/Mymlen
Summary: Pre Raven Boys, the summer before the boys meet Blue. Gansey is sleep deprived and his friends are slipping away from him. Ronan is constantly disappearing, Adam is angry and resentful and won't accept any help Gansey offers.Until one night after another one of their fights when he does.





	What pulls us apart

Even at night it was never really dark in the living room of Monmouth where Gansey slept. Sometimes slept. Rarely, these days. One wall was almost entirely made up of huge factory windows and even on cloudy nights like this one, the light from Henrietta seeped inside turning Gansey’s room into a shadowy blue copy of it’s daytime-self; everything still visible, but darker with deeper shadows. Sometimes it filled him with restlessness, that glimpse of otherness in the middle of the familiar. Nighttime in Monmouth seemed full of the sort of promise that nothing in his bookshelf, all those dusty dreams of Glendower, could satisfy. Those were the nights Ronan could sometimes persuade him to come with him on his reckless excursions.

This night, it was a different kind of restlessness. He hadn’t even tried going to bed. He’d come back late after dropping off Adam, the low bass of terrible music telling him that Ronan was already home. He’d plucked out his contacts, found his glasses and settled down in the circle of yellow light from the desk lamp he’d placed next to his newest insomnia project – a cardboard model of Henrietta he’d started on a few weeks before. It wasn’t much yet, he’d only done a couple of the simplest houses on main street, but he liked the slowness of it, how long it took him to get all the details right. In some ways, it was like his journal; both of them were love letters to the subjects of his devotion, manifestations of the way they looked inside his head: Glendower and Henrietta.

Tonight the cardboard remained cardboard. Ronan had turned his music off long ago. Gansey’s joints ached from lack of sleep and he’d cut and glued the rough outlines for two new houses, but they were still without front steps, no mullions in the windows.

The fight with Adam was rattling around his head.

Adam had come along for a trip to check out another one of Gansey’s hunches – a patch of woods a town over that was supposed to be haunted. They had both known it would probably turn out to be nothing, Gansey had just wanted to go and get some EMF readings before they dismissed it. They hadn’t found anything. Then they’d driven back to Henrietta and he’d offered to take Adam home which for some inexplicable reason had ticked him off. It had been exactly like all their other fights; Adam suddenly turning cold, his replies short and clipped, and Gansey had tried to make him tell him what was wrong and then he had said another stupid thing and the silence around Adam grew even more thorns.  
The worst part was that even after turning the sentences over and over in his head for what must have been hours, he still wasn’t sure exactly where he’d gone wrong, if it was when he offered that Adam could stay at Monmouth if he didn’t want to go home, or if it had been something before that, if perhaps it had been building all day.  
Gansey sighed and leaned back against the leg of his desk behind him. He pushed up his glasses up and pinched the bridge of his nose. God, how he wanted to sleep.

His phone buzzed.

He picked it up, for a moment fearing it would be Declan’s name on the display, even though he knew Ronan was asleep in the next room, but nobody else ever called him this late.

It wasn’t Declan, though. It was Adam.

“Hello?” Gansey said, voice gravelly and close to a whisper.

He cleared his throat.

“Sorry if I woke you up,” said Adam.

He sounded tired too, his vowels dragging the way he hardly ever allowed them to anymore. Something twisted in Gansey’s chest.

“I was awake,” he said.

He could hear Adam breathing. _Are you alright?_ He wanted to ask but didn’t.

“Can you come pick me up?”

Gansey glanced at the clock. It was almost two.

“Sure,” he said. “Where are you.”

“Where you dropped me off.”

“The end of the road?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“Thanks,” Adam muttered and hung up.

Gansey took a deep breath.

“Alright,” he said and gathered himself up.

He picked up the keys to the Camaro from his desk and stuck his bare feet into his shoes.

-

The trailer park was on the outskirts of Henrietta, only visible as a patch of darker shadows in the night. There was still light in a couple of windows, yellow squares visible through the darkness. Adam was a shadowy figure by the side of the road. Gravel crunched under the wheels of the Camaro when Gansey pulled over. He kept the engine running. Adam pulled the door open, dropped into the front seat and slammed it shut behind him. Gansey turned the car around and sped back towards town.

Adam didn’t say anything while they drove. Gansey glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. Light from the streetlamps flickered over his face. There were dark shadows on his neck. Gansey thought they might be bruises, but he didn’t ask.

Adam was slumped in his seat, face turned to the window. This was Adam wrapping himself in barbed silence, keeping Gansey at arm’s length. Gansey knew how much he hated this, hated that he had asked for help, so now they had to pretend that he hadn’t and they had to pretend that nothing was wrong and that it was perfectly alright for Adam to be staying at that place when he should be taking every chance he got to get away from there. Gansey had thought he understood Adam’s stubbornness in the beginning, something about wanting to prove himself, but it had stopped making sense a long time ago. He wished he could understand, but it was incomprehensible to him why he kept going, as if he hadn’t already earned his space at Aglionby a hundred times over by now. As if accepting Gansey’s invitation to stay at Monmouth would somehow make him less than the rest of them, even though none of them had done anything to earn the roof over their head or their overpriced education, even though they had _all_ had it handed to them. Sometimes it seemed like even being friends with Gansey was painful for Adam and Gansey couldn’t for the life of him figure out why. He wasn’t like that with Ronan. It had taken a while before Ronan had stopped complaining about and ignoring Adam and accepted him as a permanent addition to Gansey’s group of friends. It had happened slowly, Ronan’s hostility gradually morphing into a different brand of friendly antagonism. He still fought with Adam much more often than Gansey did, but Gansey had still found himself getting jealous of their relationship, even though he was the one who had become friends with Adam first, even though he was supposed to be closer with him. It was the ease with which Ronan dealt with Adam – their fights were louder, more frequent, but they weren’t tense, they didn’t feel poisonous, they didn’t build up for days, and they didn’t linger for weeks afterwards. No matter how bad their fights were, Adam never resented Ronan.

“Where are we going?” asked Adam quietly.

“I was just going to drive back to Monmouth.”

“Alright.”

“We can go somewhere else?”

“Monmouth is fine.”

“Do you want to stay the night?”

“If it’s alright.”

“Of course.”

-

A few minutes later they pulled up in front of Monmouth Manufacturing. The headlights danced over the grey factory wall and gleamed off of Ronan’s BMW. Gansey was glad to see it was still there. He turned the key, killing the headlights and the growl of the engine. He pulled the hand break, there were the clicks and rattle of seatbelts being unbuckled, doors pulled open and slammed with dry claps, one after the other. The night was cool and pleasant, a chill wind lifting the oppressive summer heat left over from the day.

He unlocked the front door, and started up the stairs with the soft scuffle of Adam’s footsteps following behind him on the stairs as they ascended to the livable part Monmouth above the cavernous ground floor that was still the untouched, abandoned factory space it had been when Gansey first bought the place.

The sound of the door opening and closing, Gansey stepping out of his shoes, the creaking floorboards, it all seemed uncomfortably loud in the dead silence inside.

“Is Ronan out?” asked Adam, voice low.

“Asleep, I think. He was here when I left.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah.”

Adam crossed his arms and glanced around the room with a strained look on his face, continuing to not look at Gansey the same way he had when he got in the car. There was an uncomfortable beat of silence. Gansey had to force himself not to ask Adam to sit down. It irritated him how lost he looked. He didn’t have to, if he would just allow himself to think of Monmouth as home- and Gansey had to push that feeling back as well. He didn’t understand, and for some reason that was condescending. He hated that condescension was apparently something built into him so deeply that it was impossible to filter it out, even with his closest friends.

“Do you want something to drink?” he asked.

Adam shrugged.

“Sure.”

Gansey went into the bathroom, Adam followed. He stood in the doorway, watching Gansey as he rummaged around in the fridge.

“Coke alright?”

“It’s fine.”

Gansey handed him a can. Adam took it silently but didn’t open it. Gansey straightened up. Adam stayed in the doorway. He was looking past Gansey, still frowning and Gansey allowed himself to watch him for a second. His face was different at night, not so drawn, the dark circles under his eyes not as visible, and the vaguely alien elegance of his face became more pronounced. He was so incredibly still. Gansey had had years to get used to Ronan’s constant, restless fidgeting, how his hands were always moving and his eyes constantly searching the room for another distraction. Adam didn’t move unless the movement had purpose, but there was nothing relaxed about his stillness.

Then Adam looked back at him, and Gansey looked away, embarrassed, feeling strangely like Adam had caught him at something.

“I’m sorry about earlier,” said Adam quietly.

Gansey waved it away.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I don’t want us to fight.”

“No,” said Gansey. “Me neither.”

He started towards the door like that was the end of it, but Adam didn’t move.

“But I can’t leave.”

“Okay.”

“I know you think I’m being stupid.”

Gansey sighed.

“We don’t have to do this again,” he said, feeling irritation stirring in his chest, but also a twinge of something else, something he didn’t want to think too hard about.

“I’m sorry about the fight, but I just can’t-“ Adam began, like he had to force every word out of his mouth.

“I know,” Gansey interrupted him. “It’s fine.”

Adam still didn’t move. He still held the unopened can of soda and he still looked lost.

“You know you could stay here,” said Gansey.

“I know,” Adam said.

He said it the same way Gansey did, wryly and halfheartedly. Because it was such an obvious lie and they both knew it. And there was the twinge in Gansey’s gut again, the feeling that Adam was slipping away from him. He had only just found him, but he was already loosing his hold, the same way he was with Ronan. It had been almost a year since Niall Lynch died, and Gansey wanted to give him the time he needed to mourn, but it left him wrestling his own, guilty sense of loss, because it was gradually becoming clear to him that the old Ronan wasn’t and wouldn’t be coming back. Ronan’s grief was angry and restless and as much as Gansey wanted to be there and be his friend, he couldn’t hide his disapproval of the way Ronan tried to exorcise it – the drinking, the smoking, the street racing, the drinking and street racing in a lethal cocktail that left Gansey sleepless and anxious whenever Ronan didn’t come home at night. Last week he had shown up at school at noon with Kavinsky’s pack looking hollow-eyed and hung over, and for the first time in months they had fought. And now Adam was pulling away too and everything Gansey did to hold on to him eventually ended up pushing him further away.

“Don’t look at me like that,” said Adam.

Gansey flinched, then tried to look like he hadn’t.

“How am I looking at you?”

“Like I’m a ticking bomb or something.”

“Sorry,” Gansey said.

He looked away from Adam’s face, his eyes fixating on his long, tan fingers holding the can of coke. That was another thing: you couldn’t touch Adam. There was an invisible barrier around him, and Gansey couldn’t remember the last time he had even been as close to him as he was now, only a foot or so of empty space between them, and suddenly he had an overpowering urge to break that wall. Ronan did it all the time. It was like he didn’t even know it was there.

So Gansey reached out and put a hand on Adam’s arm. He regretted the impulse as soon as he touched him. His hand suddenly awkward, the movement completely pointless, he hadn’t thought about what would come next, but he couldn’t just pull it back now, he might have to explain that too, and he didn’t _want_ to be treating Adam like a ticking bomb, even if that was exactly how he felt about 90 percent of the time.

So instead he left his hand where it was and ran his thumb over Adam’s freckled skin.

“What are you doing?” asked Adam quietly.

Gansey looked up at him and slid his hand up Adam’s arm towards his shoulder, brushing the sleeve of his t-shirt.

“I just-“ he began and then didn’t know what came next.

He dropped his hand.

“I don’t know.”

They were still standing too close and something in Adam’s expression had changed. He looked confused but also suddenly open, a raw and sad longing in his eyes that seemed to carry exactly the same tone as the unutterable tightness in Gansey’s chest. Adam’s eyes were wide and his lips slightly parted, and Gansey felt a surge of recklessness, the kind that Ronan occasionally dragged out of him, a brief second of being honestly unafraid, a sudden desire to hurl himself into a free fall.

So he leaned in, and Adam did too, and he didn’t close his eyes at first, but could see Adam’s pale eyelashes and the freckles on his cheek slightly out of focus. Gansey had kissed girls before. It had always been clumsy, awkward things, maneuvering tongues and teeth and spit slicked lips. Adam’s lips were dry and his mouth was soft and open enough that Gansey could kiss just his bottom lip. Adam sighed and Gansey felt the brush of hot air in his own mouth. He touched Adam’s arm again, held on to him and kissed him a little harder, his tongue finding Adam’s tongue and _God_ , it had never really hit him how _intimate_ that was; it was like every cell in his brain had abruptly devoted itself to taking in those sensations and nothing else, until he felt Adam’s hand on his hip, pulling him into him, their bodies pressed against each other. He breathed in hard through his nose, he buried his hand in Adam’s hair and Adam’s tongue slipped inside his mouth, and somewhere in the back of his mind he registered how pathetic it was, the way he clung to him, but he kept his eyes squeezed tightly shut, holding on to the safety of the darkness behind his eyelids, and kept on kissing him.

And then Adam pulled back, the grip around Gansey’s waist slackened, Gansey lowered the hand cupping Adam’s head, strands of hair slipping between his fingers. The look in Adam’s eyes was complicated, but he wasn’t angry.

“Gansey-“

A door slammed and they both jumped. Adam took sudden a step back, glancing nervously down the hallway.

“Probably Noah,” Gansey said.

“Right,” said Adam.

“We should… you know, we should probably get some sleep.”

He tried to say it casually, but his voice wasn’t acting right.

“Right,” Adam mumbled.

He moved out of the doorway and Gansey followed him after casting a quick look down the hall, where Ronan and Noah’s rooms were.

-

They pulled the spare mattress out from under Gansey’s bed, Adam found an extra blanket in one of the cupboards and Gansey got him a pillow from the couch. They didn’t say much. Gansey was so tired all of a sudden. Adam kicked off his pants and pulled the blanket over himself. Gansey climbed into bed, the old springs screeched and twanged under him.

“Goodnight,” he said.

“Goodnight, Gansey.”

It was already starting to get light out, the sky losing its blackness and slowly turning a dark blue. Gansey watched the ceiling. He could hear Adam breathing. There was a creaking of floorboards as Adam turned over. Gansey closed his eyes. His limbs felt like led. His mind was quiet.

**Author's Note:**

> Rebloggable version on tumblr, if anyone happens to be interested: https://maaske-egnet.tumblr.com/post/162046507849/even-at-night-it-was-never-really-dark-in-the


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